Why Vilifying Debate Serves to Hurt Us All

Duane Gundrum
4 min readFeb 15, 2018

I was taking a required “Crucial Confrontations” course some time back in a previous job. I find these exercises really funny because they’re designed to “help” you deal with confrontations at work but automatically make an erroneous supposition that everyone who has a job also has negative confrontations at work. Then it gets worse because they assume that you’re constantly at odds with people and that you’re obvious lacking in abilities to handle yourself in these horrible circumstances. I’m going to let you all in on a little secret: I get along smashingly with the people I work with, and a course on “Crucial Confrontations” needs a crucial confrontation with its suppositions because not always do we have problems with the people with whom we work. It’s actually pretty funny to listen to a group of people who actually get along with each other trying to find some reason to complain before giving up and deciding that they’d rather just eat more of the free bagels and laugh with each other over how ridiculous life can be sometimes.

But one thing that was included in the conversation that kept bugging me was the fact that the authors of these series of books and corporate programs (Grenny Patterson and Switzler McMillan…really, are these really their names?) seem to have a HUGE complex with the process of debate because every time they mention it, they use such statements as “avoid letting someone use debate tactics in conversation”. In other words, they don’t see debate as what it is, but as they seem to perceive debate might be.

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Duane Gundrum

Author of Innocent Until Proven Guilty and 15 other novels. Writer, college professor and computer game designer.